Meet Toshiba’s New Robot

Toshiba’s new robot has been designed to enter highly radioactive parts of a stricken nuclear plant and finding out what’s happening inside.

But since last year, some Japanese robots have taken on a completely new role: entering highly radioactive parts of a stricken nuclear plant and finding out what’s happening inside.

Toshiba Corp., which makes everything from chips to nuclear reactors, said Wednesday that it has developed a tetrapod-shaped robot designed to navigate severely contaminated parts of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which has been destroyed by last year’s earthquake and tsunami.

More than a year and a half after the Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan is still trying to grasp the exact conditions inside the stricken plant, with help from robots. That’s still the first step in a decades-long process of cleaning up and decommissioning the reactors. Toshiba has supplied two of the reactors at the Fukushima plant.

Compared to the caterpillar-like robots that have been used at the plant so far Toshiba says this new four-legged robot can easily climb stairs and avoid obstacles, while capturing images with its camera and measuring radiation levels with its dosimeter in areas human workers can’t access.

”This robot can enter parts of the plant that haven’t been investigated before,” said a Toshiba spokesman.

Still, caterpillar-like robots with wheels sometimes have difficulty in climbing steep slopes or stairs, or avoiding objects blocking the way, according to Toshiba.

Toshiba says the new robot, which doesn’t have a name, can walk on uneven surfaces with obstacles. Using its arm, the tetrapod robot can release a smaller companion robot, also equipped with a camera, which can examine tiny spaces that the main robot can’t enter. The main robot and the companion robot are connected with a cable, but if the smaller robot gets stuck, the main robot can cut off the cable.